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What are the different types of terrain engines used these days?
Im curious if my new method has been done before, and if its efficient enough for a real program.
The way it will work is there will be to main linked lists.
The terrain will be divided up into sectors. One list stores an object for each sector and that object contains data about the height of each point and the textures to be bound to each poly.
The other list will have an object for each sector, each sector will have a list and it will contain an object for each texture used in the sector, and finally each of those objects would contain a list that would have an object for each poly to be drawn.
This lets me minimize texture binds and only makes me sort everything out once.
With this method I hope to be able to add terrain sectors at runtime and morph the terrain easily. the only downfall to the method is that to decide what sectors to draw you would have to scan the whole main list, if it continues to expand at runtime there could be a great number of sectors in it.
I could perhaps help that by only checking which ones to draw once or twice a second. But as for the rest I think it would be pretty efficient, sure its running through alot of lists, but it would be making use of every object it ran across, drawing them as it scanned the list.
Any comments?